A Polytheistic Holiday

One can never understand one's own homeland before being faced with another that is incomprehensible. The most important qualities of "home", previously assumed to be simply the way things must be, can only be articulated after being juxtaposed with the jarringly different assumptions of an alien land. G. K. Chesterton introduced his reflections on visiting America: "A man is perfectly entitled to laugh at a thing because he happens to find it incomprehensible. What he has no right to do is to laugh at it as incomprehensible, and then criticise it as if he comprehended it. The very fact of its unfamiliarity and mystery ought to set him thinking about the deeper causes that make people so different from himself, and that without merely assuming that they must be inferior to himself."

The study of biblical monotheism, a "homeland" for most in the West, might well begin, therefore, with an extended journey into a polytheistic world. Unfortunately, our access to the thought-world of the polytheistic elements of ancient Israel is quite limited. As with the study of many of the "losers" of history, source writings are dominated by the perspective of the "winners". So perhaps we can visit other polytheistic "lands" for help, always aware that there will assuredly be stark differences with the biblical world. There are better documented, monotheism-polytheism struggles than those of the Old Testament. Examples include the struggle between Christianity and Roman paganism, modern missionary struggles with traditional religions, and perhaps even struggles between the three Abrahamic religions and Durkheimian functional religions, such as Nazism, Soviet socialism, and present-day liberal democratic capitalism. Despite drastic differences, perhaps visits to these foreign lands can illuminate the otherwise easily missed peculiarities of various forms of biblical monotheism.